Bitter (Pet #0.5)

by Akwaeke Emezi

Bitter had no interest in the revolution. She was seventeen, and she thought it was ridiculous that adults wanted young people to be the ones saving the world, as if her generation was the one that had broken everything in the first place. It wasn’t her business.

Lucille was a brutal city to live in. There had been mass shootings at the public schools, at the movie theaters, at the shopping centers. Everyone knew someone else who had died from something they didn’t have to die from. Too many people had seen others die, even if it was in frantic livestreams and videos, witnesses risking their lives and freedoms to record the cops and their gleeful atrocities. Too many mothers had buried their children under a lethally indifferent administration. All of Bitter’s friends were sick of it, and rightfully so. The world was supposed to have gotten better, not become even more violent, rank with more death. It was no wonder the people took to the streets, masses swallowing the roads and sidewalks, because in a world that wanted you dead, you had to scream and fight for your aliveness.

She curled up in the large gray armchair pushed against the wall as far from the window as her room would allow and bent her head over her sketchbook, turning up the old-school music in her headphones and worrying at the steel ring in her lower lip. The metal was cool against her tongue, and Big Freedia’s voice fell into her ears over an accelerating beat as Bitter mouthed the words along, trying to match the speed, her pencil making quick, strong strokes over the paper.

Sometimes, when she had music filling her ears and paper spreading at her fingers, Bitter could almost feel the bubble she was building, as if it was tangible, a shield that would protect her better than her weak windows. If she got it just right, maybe she could block out everything else entirely. Maybe when the stomps and chants five floors down on the street turned into screams and people running, the bubble could block out the other sounds that Bitter knew would come with it—the clank and hiss of canisters, the attack dogs barking, the dull heaviness of water cannons spitting wet weight on flesh. On the bad days, there was gunfire, an inhuman staccato. Sometimes the streets were hosed off afterward. Bitter frowned and bent closer to her drawing, adding a crest of spikes. It looked like a dragon now, which was fine, but it just wasn’t right. She ripped out the sheet from her sketchbook and crumpled it into a messy ball, tossing it aside.

There were things she could draw and then there were things she could draw, and when the streets were loud the way they were this evening, only the second sort of thing would do. Only the second sort of thing could make her feel a little less lonely.

Fine, then. “There eh nothing to do,” Bitter snapped, her voice heavy. She didn’t want to look at him. “Everyone does keep fighting and fighting, one generation after another, and nothing changes. If you born lucky, then you live lucky. Otherwise…” She let her voice trail off because it had nowhere to go. “It is what it is.” Saying the words made Bitter feel like a dark cloud had hugged her, wrapping her in soft, thick gray, numbing her skin. She pulled her knees up on the sofa and picked at the ring in her lip, circling it around. Aloe probably wasn’t going to like her now, but that didn’t matter. None of this mattered; none of this was real. Her little spiral was interrupted by the sound of Aloe chuckling softly to himself.

Bitter glared at him. “What’s so funny?”

“It hurting all the time and I cyah feel it, I cyah let mehself feel it, ’cause then ah go break in so many pieces, yuh could never find enough of me to put back together. How yuh expect me to go fight, be out there facing these people who doh care if we alive or if we dead, they killing us all the time and is ah game to them. All we doing is throwing more and more of us into their damn teeth. Fuh what? Fuh hope?”

She sniffled and dragged the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her face, swiping roughly at her eyes and nose. Aloe had let go of her hand, but he was still listening intently, his eyes soft.

“Hope is a waste of fucking time,” Bitter said. “It doh matter if we at the school—you know how many kids they never find? How many girls like me just…disappear because someone selling them? Is like we get a life jacket and then you still know there’s people out there drowning and you just sitting on a boat watching them drown and you remember what the drowning was like but you cyah bring yourself to go back.” She sho...

This date was already a disaster. She just wanted to go back to Eucalyptus, put on her headphones, and lie in bed listening to something loud enough to erase all these feelings she’d thrown up in front of this guy. “Hey.” Aloe touched her wrist lightly, and Bitter looked up to see him staring at her, his own eyes damp. “Can I give you a hug?” he asked, his voice tentative. “Please?” She was so surprised that he was crying, all she could do was nod, and then Aloe was wrapping his arms around her, swallowing her up in his wingspan, in his broad shoulders and chest, anchoring her. Bitter felt her heart wrench—he was hugging her like he needed to be held too, so she slid her arms around his ribs, smelling the lemon of his shirt, his back wide under her hands. Tension clicked free inside her, loosening her muscles, and she let out a jagged breath against his neck. “You’re not alone,” Aloe whispered.

He released her, and Bitter wiped at her eyes again, not sure if she could believe him. “And hope is not a waste of time. Hope is a discipline.” Aloe said the words with such complete confidence, with such a backbone of faith, that this time Bitter let them seep into her, just enough to register. She knew about discipline from her work; she knew about rigor and how you had to practice and practice and practice until you carried it with you in your bones.

“Where did you learn that?” she asked. The words had sounded too old for his mouth. Aloe broke into a grin. “Mariame Kaba,” he said. “An organizer who fights for prisons to be abolished. Assata taught it to me—she’s been one of their Elders for a while now.”

“I’m training to be a protest medic,” he said, his voice tinged with pride in his work. “Eddie connected me to the trainers at Assata.” Bitter blinked, taken aback. “I thought you were a sound artist?” “Yes, but it’s also so powerful as a tool for healing. I started doing healing circles with organizers and protesters—that’s how I met Eddie—and then I thought maybe I could help in a more immediate way, you know?” “Wow. That’s…amazing.” Bitter felt a little awkward.

Aloe stood up and reached out his hand. “Of course. I wanted today to be the perfect date.” His eyes crinkled with pleasure. “And it really was.” Bitter just sat there, staring at him, and Aloe laughed, grabbing her hand impatiently. “Come on!” he said.

Yeah. That's how mine usually go. I don't mind. 🌪🌩👾💜

Time unspun into textures, the wood against her cheek, the cotton of her sweats against her damp skin. Colorful circles brightened and dimmed behind her eyelids, salt dried on her face, and the muscles of her arms stayed locked around herself. Everything outside her room, outside the puddle she was in on the floor, it all melted away. Bitter used to do this inside the lost years, in those houses she didn’t remember anymore, curling and floating away until the pain wasn’t real anymore, until nothing was real and she was lost inside a kind of trance that bled smoothly into a halfway sleep. Hours could vanish like this, warped away in a place her mind had made safe, so by the time Bitter uncurled herself and sat up, she wasn’t surprised to see that the day had already gone into deep dusk, a touch away from dark.

Fumio Itabashi’s “Watarase” was playing on an endless loop, maddened streaks of piano trilling through the air, washing away everything outside the walls so that it was only Bitter and the hot oil flooding her heart and the wood and her arm striking across it. To her surprise, the rage didn’t feel heated as it worked its way out of her. If felt cold, certain as ice, dark as deep water. Her desire was clear—she wanted the monsters gone. Assata had been fighting for this for as long as she could remember, their Elders before them, for the same thing, and how long was everyone supposed to wait? James Baldwin had asked this question years and years before; so had Lena Horne; so had thousands of tired people who just wanted to live. How much time was it going to take? Bitter drew more bold lines with the chalk, thick and white across the wood, shadowing a face in gray, filling in the long neck, the wide, wide mouth, a stain of turmeric and charcoal for the eyes.

She stepped back and looked at it, the music racing like a river through her veins, white foam and speckled water. The figure wasn’t even close to enough. Bitter maneuvered the wood panel down to the floor, on top of the sheet, so it spilled like a pool at her feet. That felt better, like it was under her hands now. She reached for a brush and a small tub of white casein paint, falling back into the figure, as the piano swept lightly over deep bass notes, over and over again, and the hours went by. Bitter added wax and eggshells, intermittent fragments of smooth gloss within the figure’s coat. She burned sheets of paper to make more ash, letting the flakes drop onto the wet paint, filling up every inch of the wood, layering the figure’s shape on top of itself, and at some point Bitter realized she was sobbing, her tears splashing on the painting, but she didn’t stop and the piano didn’t stop because the people out there hadn’t stopped so nothing, really, nothing could stop.

It took only a few seconds for the figure to stir, its wide mouth drinking in her blood, smearing it down its chin and neck. Bitter snatched her hand away and scrambled backward, watching the painting with fascinated horror. She’d never seen one this big come to life, and she hadn’t even been sure that it would, despite all the energy she’d poured into it. A groaning sound came out from the wood, and the edges of the panel began to buckle and warp. The muddy white of the figure lifted up from the surface, ballooning into the air, then it flattened back down with a wet slap before ballooning up again. It looked like it was breathing, and Bitter realized it was trying to come forth, pushing as hard as it could. Itabashi was still playing on repeat over her speakers, the volume blasting as loud as it could go, surreal birds chirping as the painting tried to break through. Goose bumps raced up Bitter’s legs.

The figure was much larger than she’d expected—its scaled head alone was about half the size of her body, with seven narrow and opaque eyes, all a feline yellow with black slits. Its neck snaked out from the painting, a streak of wax gleaming down its red throat, jagged white eggshells marking its spine, going on forever before the torso emerged with a slick hiss. The creature looked like it was made out of compressed smoke that was having a hard time staying together; it kept giving off thick gouts of gray and white that would then pull back to the body. It was already eclipsing Bitter’s room, its head bending against her ceiling as the rest of its body broke out of the wood, long limbs and hooked claws. An acrid smell filled the air, and Bitter noticed that the wooden panel was charring as the creature worked its way through. She stared in shock as the wood burned, as this thing unfolded in front of her, terrifying and absolutely too big for this world.

Miss Virtue was going to be fucking pissed.

It was still unimaginably large—she had to crane her neck back to be able to look up at it. It dragged the rest of its body out of the painting, leaving a charred hole in the middle of the wood panel. Bitter could see that the sheet underneath was singed, and she said a quick and futile prayer to no one in particular that the floor wasn’t damaged, because she had no idea how she’d explain that to Miss Virtue. The creature’s several eyes looked at Bitter without blinking, out of that scaled and shifting face, the chasm of its mouth perpetually stretched as wisps of smoke drifted off it and dispersed into the air. “Child,” it said again, but this time its voice didn’t hurt. It was low, too low to be from this world, guttural and thick, like something that had been dead for a very long time.

The cut she’d made was still seeping blood, and just reaching out pulled on the skin, making it hurt worse. She winced and fought back tears. The creature extended one of its smoky limbs, retracting its claws until only one was out, curved and sharp. “Doh hurt me,” Bitter whispered, suddenly afraid that it was going to rip her arm open some more, take all her blood for itself. She was too scared to move—there was nowhere to run to. The creature paused, its yellow eyes flickering at her. “I would never hurt you, child.” It touched its claw to her forearm, and the tip of it sank into her skin like a dream. There was no pain at first, just an increasing warmth that seared down the length of the wound. Bitter gasped as the cut flared hot, then watched in shock as the flesh pulled itself back together, healing quickly. The creature removed its claw, and her arm wasn’t on fire anymore, the cut wasn’t there anymore.

“Do not be afraid,” Vengeance said. “The world changes when the angels return. You will see it, hear it. It will make its way into your language, it will bend the shape of your air.” Vengeance stretched out, and Bitter backed up against the wall. “The hunters only hunt those who need hunting, those who cause harm and call down the hot light upon their heads.” “The world changes?” Bitter echoed, as if saying it again would help it make sense. “It burns,” Vengeance said, and its voice glitched back into the thick guttural sound, heavy and dead.

“This world’s already burning.” Vengeance turned to her and smiled again. “Yes,” it crooned. “It is. It can burn even better.” Something about its assurance pulled at Bitter. It sounded like it had a vision. “What does better look like?” she asked.

“Hunt with me, child. We must hunt together—that is the way. Angel and human. With the hunter comes the stripping light, the purged souls, the chance for another world to burst forth. All births are full of blood.” It looked distracted again, like talking to her was keeping it from something else, like she was taking too long to cooperate. “Not everyone survives.” Bitter was properly scared now.

Bitter opened her mouth to object again, but before she could say anything, Vengeance had poured itself through her window in a long spill, leaving the glass undisturbed. It swirled briefly, then soared off into the sky. Bitter stood by the window, her hands trembling as she watched. She could feel something stretched between them, a connection that ached as it vanished from sight. She sat heavily on her bed, her heart thudding, her arm perfect.

“We are each other’s harvest,” he said, his voice soft as he recited the Gwendolyn Brooks lines, and the crowd picked it up, their voices a swelling susurrus. “We are each other’s business,” they chanted as one. “We are each other’s magnitude and bond.” Chills raced up Bitter’s arms as she watched Ube put down the megaphone.

“Y’all grab your mugs and show the new kids where the tea cabinet is,” Miss Bilphena said. “Ube and I are going to go on ahead and have a little chat. We’ll have our usual.” She left with her hand resting lightly on his shoulder, and Bitter watched as Alex merged seamlessly in with the rest of the group, as if she’d never left. They passed each other bright ceramic mugs from the rustic wood shelves on the kitchen wall, seeming relieved to be doing something normal, something that didn’t require thinking about vanishing angels and wars and impending bloodshed. Alex beckoned to Bitter and Blessing as she pulled open a cabinet door. “Okay, so this is where all the tea is kept,” she said, and Blessing whistled. It was a ridiculous amount of tea, in jars and muslin bags, handwritten labels scribbled and hanging from small tags. “Miss Bilphena drinks ginger with honey—” “I got her mug over here,” a kid with locs and a snakebite piercing called out. “Someone pass me the honey?” A jar of manuka honey went from hand to hand, and Alex added a tea bag full of dried ginger. “Ube drinks…” Alex paused and frowned. “Does he still drink peppermint?” Another girl reached over her shoulder and grabbed a jar. “Yup, I got it.” “Bet.” Alex took down a box and turned it over to read the label. “I think you’ll like this one, Blessing. It’s hibiscus with blood orange.” “Ooh, I want that too,” Bitter piped up. They stepped away from the cabinet to let everyone else make their picks, then filled up...

There was something about the Assata safe house that reminded Bitter of Eucalyptus and Miss Virtue, that spirit of a space that was designed for the lost ones, the abandoned ones, designed to hold them safe and tell them they never had to leave again. Bitter hadn’t expected to find this same vibe here, to find actual tenderness within Assata. She’d thought they were just about fighting on the front lines, that their home space would be full of loud debates and decrying, but instead it was simply a bunch of tired kids climbing onto soft furniture, holding their mugs of tea and telling Miss Bilphena what had happened in the atrium with the angels. Bitter joined Alex and Blessing on a corduroy couch, tucking herself against the arm like she was back in her room.

The angel glanced back at her. “Blood is blood,” it said. “There are no new worlds without sacrifice.” Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, Vengeance vanished, and the four of them were left in the alley, alone with the body of a man who had done nothing but bring sweetness into their lives.

They glanced at each other and shook their heads. “Nah, those things are scary as fuck,” the girl in red said, looking shaken. “They don’t—they don’t care about anything.”

“Tea?” Miss Bilphena offered. “Yes, please.” Miss Virtue walked with her into the kitchen and sat down, unbuttoning her cuffs and rolling her sleeves up. “Chamomile, if you have it.” The gas stove clicked as a ring of blue fire erupted under the kettle, and Bitter leaned against the kitchen wall, letting her legs give way until she was sitting on the floor. Blessing sat down next to her. “How you feeling, babe? This shit is wild.”

Blessing’s eyes looked haunted by what she had seen in the park. She adjusted her hijab around her face and summoned up a little smile.

Bitter pushed herself up from the floor. “That’s fine,” she said, remembering Mr. Nelson’s face breaking open into a smile as he watched her taste the sweet potato pie in his kitchen just yesterday. Now he was lying gray and cold out in that alley with Alex’s jacket over him, all because of the angel. “I real pissed too.”

Vengeance materialized in the same spot it had disappeared from the last time, right under the weeping willow. It was back in its full form, all smoke and seven angry eyes with a bloodstained mouth. The willow branches drifted right through it like it was a ghost.

“Do not be afraid,” she said, the words clanging into the air.

“Think you can get ’em to back off? We officially got too many angels in Lucille right now. They gotta get the fuck outta here.”

Bitter closed her eyes and stopped thinking of Vengeance as an angel. It was a painting. It was a smash of smoke trapped inside a piece of wood. It was something she had made, it was hers, to make alive and to make…unalive. It was eggshell and ash, casein and chalk, wax and blood. It had taken this form because she painted it that way, had climbed out of the panel because she told it to. A small suspicion began to blossom in Bitter’s mind. Back in the alley, as she’d knelt weeping beside Mr. Nelson, Vengeance had been with the rest of the angels. It clearly didn’t care about Mr. Nelson, but it had come when she’d called for it. That was the rule with the things Bitter made. They came when they were called. They obeyed.

Vengeance slithered to her with uncanny speed, eating up the distance between them and dropping its face to hers, mouth stretching in threat. Bitter heard Aloe and Blessing gasp behind her, but she didn’t turn, didn’t flinch. “Careful, child,” Vengeance hissed. “Your world is full of monsters.” Bitter wasn’t afraid anymore. If there had been a miracle in any of this, then surely that had to be it, that she wasn’t afraid anymore.

Vengeance let out an enormous roar and lunged at her, its mouth unhinging as if to swallow Bitter alive. Aloe screamed and Miss Virtue took a rumbling step forward, but then Vengeance blew apart in a cloud of white smoke, eggshells crashing to the ground, ash layering over Bitter’s clothes and eyelashes, wax melting on her sweats. Just like that, the angel was gone.

She was too exhausted to process it, but she could dimly recall the emotion in Miss Virtue’s voice when she spoke about her students. Maybe some things were true, then. “You did well, little gate,” the remaining angel said. “We shall fix the rest of it.” Behind her, the mayor was still slumped on the floor, unconscious. “Okay. Good.” Bitter felt a massive wave of grayness break over her, heavy and suffocating.

She had already done enough. She had already done too much. With Aloe’s voice fading in her ears, she let herself fall into the black.

She felt utterly drained, and an image of Vengeance’s roaring mouth kept replaying in her head.

She let out a sigh and looked away. “It’s because you’re not Assata. I just—I need to be around people who know what it’s like, especially now. It helps me feel less lonely. I didn’t talk to you earlier because you wouldn’t get it, how it feels to be out there, what the costs are, all that shit. And it’s not your fault—you don’t have to. I just…I just need to be around people like me.” Bitter didn’t know what to say.

The words should have hurt way more than they did, but there was so much pain inside her that this particular rejection wasn’t registering the way she’d expected it to. Maybe there was only so much pain a heart could process at once, and now she was too numb to fight for her friend. Or maybe, there was nothing left to fight for, nothing she could give Eddie that would make Eddie feel safe and seen. “So yuh girlfriend, she’s Assata?” All Bitter could remember was Eddie describing her as a baking and gardening type. “Malachite? Yeah, she used to be. Like Alex. Tapped out a couple of months ago, but she knows what it’s like.” A semblance of light returned to Eddie’s face. “We’re gonna go out to this community farm she’s setting up for the Elders and anyone who needs to tap out.”

“That sounds lovely. You should go rest out there. You deserve it.” She wondered if her words sounded as manufactured as they felt, but she did care deeply about Eddie, so they were probably true. They just belonged to a Bitter she couldn’t quite reach in that moment.

“I don’t like how we ended up here, Bitter. But the fact is, we’re here now. All we can do is move forward.”

Ube gave her a gentle look, but it had the grit of iron behind it. “All freedoms are terrible,” he said. “That’s the part they never tell you.” For a moment, he sounded just like an angel.

Aloe didn’t come in until later in the afternoon. Bitter almost leaped out of bed to hug him, but he threw himself on her first, and they both laughed as they wrapped around each other, their joy edged and frayed. She rested her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat inside his ribs.